4x Better Graphics and way more FPS Guide

Hey Niko, the least you can do is try, use ISI vram and cpu tools to see if your hitting the limit think its CTRL C and CTRL F ingame. You will need to know what the bars mean to analyse whether its benefical to you. On a 9800gt I would say a lot comes down to Vram, the least you can do is apply all other settings in nVidia inspector before messing with Antialiasing and Supersampling. It should take you 10-15 min to see if you have any benefit if not restore your old settings and delete nVidia Inspector.

I think they've tweaked fxaa. I hated it originally and didn't bother with it for a few builds. After messing around with several different inspector settings/profiles I now use level 2 aa and fxaa. Seems to give the best balance of visuals and performance.

Hi everyone, I been playing around with graphics and found some awesome little secrets to gaining more FPS and much better Graphics. Being a nice guy I would like you all to share this wonderful new experience. For all those of you who want the look of PCars paporama in my opinion this is close enough to make rFactor2 smoke any other driving/racing game visually and playably. I don't have time to make this guide nice and tidy right now but I will do it later.

Transparency AA="0" // Soften edges around alpha test objects
Transparency AA will now be handled in nVidia inspector with a much less costly multisampling which to the eye looks almost identical to supersampling. The distant transparent objects will appear much nicer as you approach them and also there is non of the issues with transparency through the trees.

NVIDIA INSPECTOR

now download the latest nvidia inspector mine is 1.9.7.1
I overclock here, its upto you if you want more performance you should do the same and find your most stable settings
mine for example is
base clock = +150
Memory Clock = +150
Voltage offset = +25mv

NOW TUNING YOUR GRAPHICS

click the square tool and screwdriver next to your Driver version
Btw my driver version is 320.18 WHQL

First click on Profiles and find rFactor2 select rFactor 2(rFactor2.exe)
Then click "add application to current profile" at the top
Find and Select rFactor2.exe and then click open
Then click "Apply Changes" button at the top
Now you have successfully created an nVidia profile for rFactor2
as long as nVidia inspector is running these settings you save here will
always be applied to rfactor2.
Ok close nVidia inspector profile settings window and then open it again
Notice now in the top left it no longer says rFactor 2 but Global Driver Profile
To bring up rFactor2 settings click the little house and select rFactor2
nV inspector will now load your rFactor2 profile again
now remember after everytime you make a change you always need to click "Apply changes" button
and make sure your not on Global Driver Profile but rFactor2 when you do or you will end up changing the look of other games that may of been ok.

Now the fun and rewards (rubbing my hands together)
This will be brief just to get you started with some high quality graphics
its upto you to find the better performance and graphics for your system.

go to Antialiasing
Antialiasing - Mode = Enhance the application settings
remember in game I set the lowest AA level, I did this because rFactor knows
best where to and not to apply AA, saving plenty of unnecessary render overhead instead of nVidia
Inspector or nVidia Control Panel applying AA to everything the full screen.
what changes we make here in AA only get applied to where rFactor ingame applies AA to if you follow me.
Antialiasing - Settings = 4x Multisampling( I found this best for my system visually vs fps. Turn this down to 2x or 2xQ for more FPS but you will notice the difference in telegraph poles at Spa. Turning up the settings to 8x, 8xQ, 16x and 16xQ did slow my FPS at barely any visual gain and the FPS was mor expensive.)
Antialiasing - Transparency Multisampling = Enabled
Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling = off/Multisampling ( turning this on and multisampling off has a small hit on frames, I use just supersampling and its as good as it needs to be but tbh you dont really need this vs multisampling)
NVIDIA Predefinded FXAA Usage = Disallowed( still experimenting )

OK thats it remember "Apply Changes" to save and make sure rFactor2 profile is selected

Now load up rFactor2 test your new enhancments tell me what you think and give me some feedback. If your playing with settings its probably best to exit and restart rFactor2 from the launcher, just to be on the safe side to know your changes have been applied.

Well do you have better FPS? Do the graphics look alot better? please give feedback to me in this thread and for others.

I play in 3D with these settings an I can promise you this I have 60+FPS - 100FPS
it looks amazing to me perhaps if I turn off 3D I would have way more but 3D is too awesome
and it makes me drive much better. Everything seems to feel much smoother for me throughout my drive, even in the event of a random drop in FPS where sometimes gone down to 45 but this is in single player.

I will rewrite this document and add more detail to my findings when I have more time to make it clearer. I will possibly add a video as DrR1pper suggests below.

All i can say is that after days of experimenting i stuck with 4x sgssaa which offers best image quality and good performance on my gtx680, my second gtx680 is currently disabled for rf2 because it decreases performance and increases stuttering right now.

Ingame i have set everything to max, af and aa disabled, filtering set to billinear, shadows to high instead of max.

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If you set filtering properly to billinear you would notice a very degraded texture quality, I tried it and man the road looked PANTS!. Perhaps if your not getting these results you havent set the overide correctly in nvidia inspector, its a funny name for the overide. Besides it makes absolutely no difference to fps at x16. I think maybe what your saying is your taking the workload of rfactor in the game settings, well if you overide in nInspector it makes no difference what its set to ingame.

Adrian you are right but that just means I spend more time playing, I will sleep when I'm old or gone blind. Bedtime = 2am, Work = 7am 5 days a week, I almost fall asleep at work.
Since I joined SR4L www.simracers4life.com those boys got me really into rF2 and perfecting setups and driving the perfect line just to find a few extra milliseconds a lap and thats on Spa, the level of competition is very tight with the top racers in that league, we spend most night on the same track for a full week trying to get things right before the race on sunday. I highly recommend you come and join.
BTW I would like to ask you a few things about that Titan check your PMs later.

Adrian you are right but that just means I spend more time playing, I will sleep when I'm old or gone blind. Bedtime = 2am, Work = 7am 5 days a week, I almost fall asleep at work.
Since I joined SR4L www.simracers4life.com those boys got me really into rF2 and perfecting setups and driving the perfect line just to find a few extra milliseconds a lap and thats on Spa, the level of competition is very tight with the top racers in that league, we spend most night on the same track for a full week trying to get things right before the race on sunday. I highly recommend you come and join.
BTW I would like to ask you a few things about that Titan check your PMs later.

Click to expand...

Hi Bart

Gosh sounds like your having a great time, my rig ( finally ! ) should be up & running around the end of this month (after mainly amendments etc ) so I'll take a look at this league,

Thank you for figuring these settings out and posting them for us, Bart!

I've only had rF2 since build 218. I was originally running an old 5870 (or something) before this past weekend, and the game was almost unplayable.

I stepped up and bought a GTx660 TI over the weekend. Although the game looked better, something still wasn't right.

Plugged in your settings and BAM! New game

I'm running a STEADY 60fps (only b/c I limited the fps in my plr file) with no stuttering since I plugged in all your settings. I did have some screen tearing so I enabled vsynch. STILL 60fps. Figured I'd turn on the mirrors -- still 60fps. Thought I'd go for broke with mirrors and vsync in the Lola on Monaco ---- 50fps.

You get the idea. Great work. Thanks again!

btw, I'm not even using the built-in overclocking on my gpu. Brilliant.

To be honest, alot of what he says about memory and concentration is true. The stuff about coffee total crap its been proven caffeen will not keep you awake as much as he goes onabout. Dont know about the bipolar or schizo stuff but i'm not willin to find out. Right I'm off to bed, lol

I get a kick from caffeine during the times I dont need it as much, when I am more awake. When I am a little tired sure it can help give me a little picker upper, but when I am really really tired, like trying to work after pulling an all nighter or something, the caffeine barely works, it might make the difference between being really really really tired, and just really really tired, but its not going to help much. However when you finally get home and try to catch up on all that sleep, the caffeine may then prevent you from sleeping as thoroughly, even though it didnt seem to help earlier on.

I usually use caffeine/stimulants when I am already pretty awake, thats when you feel them the most. Using them when you are super dead tired doesnt make that much of a difference. Ill still be super tired, just slightly less.

Thanks from me too, much better picture quality with an Nvidia GT650M, even though the "way more FPS" doesn't apply for me
By setting the NVidia control panel slider to "Performance", you get a much better frame rate, although picture quality suffers, so it's always a tradeoff, at least with lower end cards like GT650.

Thank you so fkn mutch!
After my Gainward 580 GTX Phantom failed by fkn nvidia driver, a League member gave me his 8600 GTS. Before i read ur Theard, i had only 30-40 Fps ON lowest settings with 800x600 -.-. After ur Guide, i have 80-90 FPS on mid settings and 1920x1080 resolution!!!!! Overclocking my Graphic Card like u did + i overclocking my i5 2500K. Thank you so mutch dude and sorry for my bad English haha

Yeah Bart, who doesn't love having someone else do all the heavy lifting. lol Thank you again!
This is not my strong suit, honestly don't know what many of the settings do so it was a real blessing to find all this info.
I am running 5760x1080 on a gtx780 and am using your settings exactly now. The last thing I did was download Nv Inspector because I had never used it.

Had a thought... in the inspector it looks like you can export/save your settings to a file. I know you are never done tinkering but if and when that occurs perhaps you could use the export feature to post a file so others could import your settings on Nv Inspector?

Thats a really great idea lopsided, I will do that then.
Worth a note I did update nV inspector not so long ago and it didn't like loading my old profile but if I release new ones as new inspector is released then no probs.

You just reminded me I need to finish my explanations for the nVidia Inspector section, update soon again with profiles.